Andy Burnham’s first weeks as Prime Minister are drawing scrutiny from the FT, which flags what it calls “under-scrutinised” aspects of his regional policy agenda. Nothing specific has broken on UK fiscal or monetary policy overnight, but the new government’s positioning on devolution and northern economic priorities is clearly becoming a sharper focus for political correspondents ahead of what will be a busy parliamentary autumn.

Trump escalated trade tensions with the EU yesterday, threatening new tariffs in retaliation for European fines on US tech companies and saying Washington will launch a fresh probe into the bloc. This sharpens the picture heading into any autumn trade negotiations and is worth watching for sterling and European equity exposure — a broader US-EU trade row would hit the UK indirectly through supply chains and financial services even if London is negotiating its own track.

Waymo and Uber are reportedly moving toward a split, with their autonomous vehicle partnership souring amid a lobbying battle over AV rollout regulation. The FT has the story. It matters less for the immediate relationship and more for what it signals about the commercial viability of robotaxi partnerships — Waymo has been the benchmark asset in that space, and any strategic pivot affects how investors price the broader AV sector.

Anthropic’s Opus 5 release is being framed by Ars Technica as a token efficiency story rather than a capability leap. The read-through is that the frontier model race is maturing into a cost competition, which benefits enterprise buyers but compresses margins for the labs. Separately, Prentis — a new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus — is in talks to raise $100 million, with a thesis that automating routine computer tasks will overtake coding as AI’s primary commercial use case. Early-stage, but Hoffman’s involvement makes the fundraise a signal worth noting.

Zelensky is dealing with a domestic political crisis following his removal of defence minister Mykhailo Fedorov. Protests have continued and Ukrainian commentators are describing the episode as politically damaging. The timing matters: it introduces uncertainty about Ukrainian institutional coherence at a moment when Western military and financial support packages are still being negotiated.

The wildfires across Spain and France have forced the evacuation of around 200,000 people and prompted a national emergency declaration in Spain. Separately, NASA’s Deep Space Network complex in Spain has been evacuated with potential damage still to be assessed. The macro relevance is limited for now, but European energy and reinsurance markets will be watching the scale of infrastructure damage as conditions worsen through Saturday.

The Fed’s preferred inflation measure, the US core PCE for June, is due for release on Monday.

Sources

Al Jazeera, Guardian, BBC News, FT, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, Politico, The Economist — 2026-07-25